A History of Britain, Volume 3 (29 page)

The omnipresence of death seemed disproportionately chastening to a generation breezy with not entirely undeserved confidence that they had done more than any of their predecessors to master their physical environment. A civilization that had made steam-driven ships float on the oceans, that had thrown great iron spans across broad rivers, and that had shrunk the world by electric telegraph must soon, surely, conquer disease. It was indeed at this moment that advances in lensed microscopy were revealing, for the first time, the existence and culture of pathogens; although not (other than by the use of the scrubbing brush) how their multiplication might be checked.

In this tantalizingly slight gap between knowledge and mastery, mortality entered to mock the Victorian sense of control over life. Perhaps the shock of translation from apparently omnipotent physical presence to the dumb inertia of death – the
grievance
of mortality – explains the extreme peculiarity of their rites of mourning; their determination to make the dead commandingly visible amidst the living. The immense scale and grandeur of Victorian tombs, with their passionate, hyperbolic masonry – so much more flamboyant than anything allowed for the living – are all attempts to postpone oblivion and absence. With every ton of alabaster and porphyry, every weeping cherub and crepe-draped portrait, the lost one seems evermore available, waiting in some recoverable world just around the corner.

No one wanted this more desperately than Queen Victoria, vexed with God for reneging on what she felt sure had been his promise never to have Albert abandon her to the woeful burden of her constitutional toil. To see our pure happy, quiet, domestic life which
alone
enabled me to bear my
much
disliked position CUT OFF at forty-two – when I had hoped with such instinctive certainty that God never
would
part us, and would let us grow old together – is too
awful
, too cruel!’ Part of her anguish was precisely because the manner of Prince Albert’s decline and death seemed to
testify
to the indispensability of partnership as the only way to make the duties of both family and sovereignty supportable. By doing more than his share – for their family, for the country and for (she would not hesitate to say) humanity – he had worked and worried himself to death. Nor did it help that he had been under-appreciated in Britain. Instead of being granted the ‘King Consort’ title she had wanted, he had had to make do, in 1857, with ‘Prince Consort’ (as Wellington and the Tories, fearing foreign, even papal interference had blocked ‘King Albert’). Nor, for all the town halls and model factories he had visited, the innumerable hospital foundation stones he had laid, was Albert the Good and Great ever regarded as other than a foreigner; the very seriousness with which he took his duties being further proof of that for the drawling aristocracy, who still, to Victoria’s chagrin, seemed to set the tone for Society.

Not all of this was the widow’s fantasy. Albert’s obsession with the ‘Eastern Question’ and the Crimean War did seem to age him. Just because he had been suspected in the Russophobic years before the war of being soft on the Tsar, he over-compensated by throwing himself into a madness of statistical investigations, plans, inquiries. His comments on the state of the army (not good); on the need for a proper training camp; on the horrors of military medicine; on the pitfalls of logistics; on the condition of the Ottoman government; on naval issues at the Bosphorus, and so on and so on, fill 50 folio volumes. By the time Victoria arrived at her desk each morning there was a neat tower of pre-sorted, pre-screened papers for her to peruse, approve, sign. After the war was over Albert turned his attention to the complications of the Peace of Paris and relations between the two allies; the implications for Britain’s economy of the likely civil war in the United States; not to mention plans for the improvement of native cattle; schemes to use urban sewage for agrarian manure; and his work for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Always an early riser, Albert now took to getting up in deep darkness to work in the green glow of his desk lamp. Even in more easy times he ‘enjoyed himself on schedule’, according to one court commentator, noting that it was at lunch and only at lunch at Balmoral or Osborne that heavy puns were allowed. By the late 1850s, although Albert stalked the deer at Balmoral with unrelenting devotion, even the plodding jokes seemed fewer and further between. More and more time was spent by himself or lost in his own anxieties. They were turning into the royal Jack Spratt and his wife. Albert, ever more sallow and gaunt and on a hair-trigger of anger; Victoria, the perpetual mother, her wrists now disappearing into bracelets of flesh, sitting solidly by his side. He worried for Britain and she worried for him.

Both of them worried for Bertie, the Prince of Wales. Vicky, their eldest, so sweet and so sensible, had gone to the Prussian court as the Crown Princess, at just 17, amidst much unhelpful wailing on the part of her mother that she was sending her ‘lamb’ to be ‘sacrificed’ on some Teutonic marriage bed. Albert, too, missed her badly. Her departure threw her eldest brother’s chronic inability to conform to his parents’ expectations into even sharper relief. ‘Bertie’s propensity is indescribable laziness,’ his father fumed. ‘I never in my life met such a thorough and cunning lazybones.’ Away from the suffocation of the court Bertie was, in fact, a cheerful, open-faced young man who was not quite as allergic to his duties as his father thought. He did not disgrace himself academically at Christ Church, Oxford, and a tour of Canada was an out-and-out personal triumph. A spell at the Irish military camp at the Curragh, however, was less of a success. For there, as everywhere else, there was no getting away from the fact that Bertie liked his pleasures, especially when they came voluptuously corseted. It was the notoriety of his philandering that seemed, to his father and mother, calculated to wound their own publicly promoted sense of the decencies of domestic morality. His irresponsibility threatened to undo all their hard-won achievement in making the British monarchy respectable again.

Plans to marry Bertie to Princess Alexandra of Denmark were accelerated. Alix’s ravishing beauty of face and figure, as well as her genuine sweetness of character, would surely be enough to satisfy the Prince’s yen for lechery within the marriage bed. But even as the negotiations with the Danish court were under way, late in 1861, Albert and Victoria learned that Bertie was having an affair with a notorious ‘actress’. Horrified by this latest act of almost treasonable sabotage, they wrote brutally candid letters to the prince warning him of the wanton self-destruction that this latest dalliance could bring – disease, pregnancy, blackmail, the republicanism of the boudoir and the bordello! At the same time, Albert was in the throes of dealing with a diplomatic crisis when Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS
San Jacinto
stopped the British mail steamer
Trent
and removed Confederate agents, in violation of the laws of neutrality during the American Civil War. Palmerston’s Whig government, sympathetic to the South, was prepared to take the issue to the very edge of belligerence against Lincoln’s government in Washington. Albert was doing everything he could, constitutionally, to soften that response and avoid another futile war.

In late November the Prince, already ‘feeling out of sorts’ from a ‘chill’ caught during a recent visit to Sandhurst, went to see Bertie near Cambridge and read him the riot act. The weather was that of a classic
East
Anglian Michaelmas, with driving rain and slicing winds. On his return to Windsor, Albert’s chill worsened and refused to abate. He had once mused morbidly, when planting a sapling at Osborne, that he would not survive to see it mature. Now, to the acute distress of Victoria, he seemed to be measuring himself for his shroud: ‘I am sure if I had a fatal illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life. I have no tenacity of life.’ His physician, Dr James Clark, was the same man whose diagnosis and treatment of the children had driven Albert to raging despair many years before. Now Clark disposed of his critic by failing to realize that what the Prince Consort was actually suffering from was typhoid fever. By the time Palmerston-Pilgerstein had managed to summon a different doctor, it was too late.

Albert wandered in and out of clarity and from room to room in Windsor Castle, finally settling down in the Blue Room and not moving. Princess Alice played some hymns from an adjoining chamber. The queen came to read him Sir Walter Scott’s
Peveril of the Peak
(1823). The copy survives in the Royal Library, the flyleaf inscribed in Victoria’s hand, ‘this book read up to the mark
here
during his last illness and within three days of its terrible termination’. The relevant paragraph
here
reads, incredibly, ‘He heard the sound of voices but they ceased to convey any impression to his understanding and within a few minutes he was faster asleep than he had ever been in the whole … of his life.’

Was this truly coincidence? Or had the point she had reached in her reading of Scott’s novel been chosen by Victoria as a literary valediction – especially since it describes, in fact, not a death at all but a deep healing slumber? For a moment on the afternoon of 14 December, Albert stirred, seemingly better, began to arrange his hair as if he were about to dress for dinner, and murmured, ‘
Es ist nichts, kleines Frauchen
(It’s nothing, little wife).’ Victoria left the bedside for a moment or two. When she came back he was gone, and out from that plump little face there came a howl of unutterable misery.

The sovereign of the greatest empire on earth had been vanquished by the one power against whom there was no defence. She spent so many hours collapsed in great, ragged, half-choking spells of sobbing that her secretaries and ministers thought she would go mad. ‘You are right dear child,’ the queen wrote to her almost equally distracted eldest daughter, ‘I do not wish to feel better … the relief of tears is great and though since last Wednesday I have had no very violent outburst – they come again and again every day and are soothing to the bruised heart and soul.’ When she came to visit in 1862, Vicky saw her mother crying herself to sleep with Albert’s coat thrown over her, hugging his red dressing gown. ‘What a
dreadful
going to bed,’ Victoria had written in her diary. ‘What a contrast to that tender lover’s love! All alone!’

If Victoria did ever seriously contemplate suicide, duty and memory held it at bay. ‘If I live on’, she confided to the diary, ‘it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children – for my unhappy country which has lost all in losing him and in doing only what I know and feel he would wish for he is now near me – his spirit will guide and inspire me.’ As it turned out, this was an understatement. Denying death the cruel victory of separation, sustaining the illusion of the prince’s proximity, became a compulsion. Victoria spent £200,000, the same cost as the whole of Osborne, on the elaborate Italianate mausoleum at Frogmore for their tombs (which also accommodated her mother, the Duchess of Kent, who had died earlier that year) by Carlo Marochetti and the extraordinary statue by William Theed III of the two of them in Anglo-Saxon dress – the costume that defined the union of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty with what lingering historical mythology believed to be the ancient English constitution. But cold marble was not allowed to declare finis. Everything in Victoria’s world – other than the widow’s black and white cap that she would wear for the rest of her life – was designed to maintain the fantasy of Albert’s continued presence, turning court life into one long séance. The Blue Room in which he died was preserved not as a German death-chamber, a
Sterbezimmer
, but exactly and for ever as it was when he was still alive. Should the upholstery wear out, it had to be replaced with its precise replica. Every day, hot water, blade and shaving soap were laid out along with fresh clothes. His other clothes remained untouched except those on which, in her distraction, Victoria insisted on sleeping. Even when she became somewhat more composed, she continued to take his nightshirt to bed along with a plaster cast of his hand. On Albert’s side of the bed was a large photograph of the prince and a sprig of evergreen, symbolizing in the Germanic Christian tradition not just immortality but resurrection.

Widowhood became the queen’s full-time job. What was left of Victoria’s life (and, as it turned out, there was a lot) would be committed to the supreme vocation of perpetuating Albert’s memory amongst her under-appreciative subjects. If there must be merriment, it had better not be in her presence, not even during the weddings of Bertie to Alix and of Alice to Prince Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt – both of which seemed to the guests more like funerals, and were obviously torture for Victoria. At Alice’s nuptials she confessed to her journal that ‘I say “God bless her” though a dagger is plunged in my bleeding desolate heart when I hear from her that she is “proud and happy” to be Louis’s wife.’ The only tolerable literature consisted of requiem poems like the Poet
Laureate
Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
(1850). A new edition was dedicated of course to the late Prince. Victoria herself resolved to create a memorial bookshelf, commissioning an anthology of Albert’s speeches; a biography of his early life; and another five-volume biography of the complete career and works. Memorial stones went up everywhere. Granite cairns were put up along the Highland trails where Albert had stalked deer, the most imposing bearing the inscription ‘Albert the Great and Good, raised by his broken-hearted widow’. Statues were erected in 25 cities of Britain and the empire. Victoria left her seclusion in November 1866 to travel to Wolverhampton to unveil yet another, alighting from the train with ‘sinking heart and trembling knees’ to the noise of military bands and cheering, flag-waving crowds. The queen was so moved by the occasion that she called for a sword to knight the Lord Mayor, who was momentarily terrified that he was about to be beheaded. An epidemic of civic monuments broke out, to the point where Charles Dickens wrote to a friend in 1864 that ‘If you should meet with an inaccessible cave anywhere to which a hermit could retire from the memory of Prince Albert and testimonials to same, pray let me know of it. We have nothing solitary or deep enough in this part of England.’